9 de junio de 2017

“Towards a History of Paleoclimatology: Changing roles and shifting scales in climate sciences”

6-7 Sept 2017, Universität Hamburg, Germany

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 July 2017

Organised
by Dania Achermann and Simone Rödder, in cooperation with the CliSAP
Centre of Excellence “Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction”
(Universität Hamburg)
and the Centre for Environmental Humanities (Aarhus University)

The
climate of the past is a fundamental part of today’s climate research.
Paleoclimatological data from the archives of nature serve to calibrate
climate models and inform current
knowledge about future climate changes. Historian of science Matthias
Dörries argues that paleoclimatology gained political relevance by
writing a “history of the deep past” by which it also influences the
interpretation of the present; it helped to fill the
Earth’s history with concrete climate events (Dörries 2015: 25). But
how did the study of this “deep past” become such a crucial pillar of
modern climate science? How has it impacted the very notion of
‘climate’, and what were the consequences for both, paleoclimatological
and climate science practices? It is the goal of this workshop to
tackle these and related questions in an interdisciplinary setting.

In
the 1960s and 70s, results from the study of ice cores, sea sediments
and tree rings provided evidence that climate is prone to change not
only over thousands of years but also
during period of times that are within the reach of human imagination,
like years or decades. At the same time, these studies extended the
temporal scale of climate change beyond any human imagination, to
millions of years, and helped to expand the spatial
scale from regional data gathering to a global concept of climate. As
Dörries points out: “the Earth’s past in the 1980s had become quite
different from its past in the early 1960s” (27). The study of the
climate’s past shifted from being a marginalised subject
of historical climatology to being a pool of data indispensable for
climate modelling. Consequently, and with this increasing relevance, new
research questions, approaches and technologies were developed and led
to an enormous growth of the field.

Paleoclimatological
disciplines such as ice core research, tree rings and pollen analysis,
ocean and lake sediment studies have emerged from a range of scientific
fields such as
physics, glaciology, oceanography, botany, ecology, chemistry or
archaeology with differing research questions, cultures and methods of
data interpretation. The integrative presentation of paleoclimatological
data as a fundament of global climate change knowledge,
as for example in IPCC reports, tends to hide conflicts between the
different paleoclimatological fields as well as between paleoclimatology
and climate modelling regarding type and complexity of data or scales
of their validity, as well as the frictions in
the process of making paleoclimatological data fit for computer models.

This
workshop aims at exploring the changing roles of paleoclimatology as a
part of climate science and its contribution to the understanding of
climate on different temporal
and spatial scales throughout the 20th century. “Paleoclimatological disciplines” in this context refers to the study of climate of the past, including
proxy data from ice cores, tree rings, ocean and lake sediments, fossilised pollen, bones, and moraines.

Possible questions and topics for discussion include, but are not limited to, the following:

-How did different paleoclimatological fields inform climate science?

-What was the role and relevance of individual paleoclimatological fields in the development of climate models?

-How, in turn, were their research practices and approaches influenced by the rising epistemic authority of climate models?

-How did they (or did not) integrate into the hegemonic approach of model-based climate science?

-How
did climate modelling influence data “gathering” (construction),
research questions, and the epistemology of paleoclimatology?

-How did paleoclimatology contribute to a “loss of human scales” in global climate change science?

-How have the field’s scales of time and space developed and influenced our current understanding of climate?

-How
has the relationship between different paleoclimatological fields
changed? How have they influenced or competed with one another? What
were the consequences of transfers
of research technology and questions between the different fields?

-How
were different approaches towards spatiality and complexity of data
interpretation negotiated? I.e. how were different notions of
locality/globality and simplification/differentiation
of proxy information negotiated?

-How have different paleoclimatological disciplines gained – or lost – epistemic authority?

-What are the broader socio-political contexts of these developments?

The
workshop is intended as an exploratory and interdisciplinary meeting to
bring together researchers with an interest in the role and history of
paleoclimatology. We therefore
invite scholars from both the historical and the climatological
communities: historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and other
scholars from the humanities who have an interest in the development of
paleoclimatology, as well as climate scientists and paleoclimatologists
who reflect on the (changing) role of their discipline.

Confirmed speakers and panellists:

·Martin Claußen, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg

·Sarah Dry, Dept. of History, University of Oxford

·Meritxell Ramirez I-Olle, Dept. of Science and Technology Studies, University College London

·Felix Riede, Dept. of Archeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University

·Christoph Rosol, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin